by Greg Goode
Putnam, Hilary (1981). Reason, Truth, and History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Especially the chapter “Two philosophical perspectives.”
Quine,Willard Van Orman (1951). “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 20-43. See also: www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
Quine, Willard Van Orman (2013). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. First published in 1964.
Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Especially the essays “The World Well Lost,” “Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism” and “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing.”
Rorty, Richard (1989). Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. This is another one of Rorty’s collections of essays written for a more general audience. One of my (Greg’s) favorite essays is “Private irony and liberal hope,” in which he presents the “liberal ironist,” which is about as close as Rorty comes to a notion of liberated life. Rorty’s liberal ironist is the inspiration for the “joyful ironist” we talk about in the present book.
Rorty, Richard (1998). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Philosophical Papers, Volume I). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press (copyright 1991). See especially the Introduction, p. 1, and “Inquiry as recontextualization: An anti-dualist account of interpretation,” p. 93. In these two articles Rorty presents a fascinating challenge to the essentialist idea that a word gets its meaning from a thing in the world that it represents. In place of this idea, Rorty suggests a holistic approach to meaning, in which the meaning of a set of words does not come from a certain piece of the world, but from the meaning of many other sets of words. This is very much in tune with Buddhism’s idea of interdependence.
*Rorty, Richard (2000). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York, NY: Penguin. Rorty is the best overall guide to the non-essentialist, non-metaphysical tradition in the West. Rorty spent almost his entire career passionately arguing against the classic Western dualisms, and this is his most accessible book. The best chapter to begin with might be “A World without Substances or Essences.” Also the article “Truth without Correspondence to Reality.”
* Seligman, Martin (2006). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York, NY: Vintage Books. In this highly readable book, Seligman describes research on learned helplessness which shows that (in the language of emptiness) reacting to life’s adversities with negative essentialism predicts depression. Seligman gives some practical tools which allow you to subject your absolutist assumptions to scrutiny in a liberating way.
Sellars, Wilfrid (1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Introduction by Richard Rorty. Study Guide by Robert Brandom. First published in 1956. One of the most powerful anti-Cartesian arguments in the Western tradition. See especially the Introduction, sections 10-12 and 32-38, as well as the Study Guide notes on the same sections. A helpful companion piece is the book on Sellars by Willem DeVries and Timm Triplett, listed above.
Sextus Empiricus (1985). Selections from the Major Writings on Skepticism, Man, and God. Hallie, Philip Paul, Ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co.
Shusterman, Richard (1996). Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York, NY: Routledge. Shusterman shows how aesthetics can be a major source of inspiration for how you can live a “philosophical life.” The possibility of living life as a piece of art is a refreshing contemporary addition to the standard notion of the role models presented in traditional spiritual discourse, and connects well with emptiness teachings.
Sokol, Leslie and Fox, Marci (2009). Think Confident, Be Confident: A Four-Step Program to Eliminate Doubt and Achieve Lifelong Self-Esteem. New York, NY: Penguin/Perigee Trade Books.
Stenstad, Gail (2006). Transformations: Thinking After Heidegger. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. This beautiful book takes us on a poetic journey tracing Heidegger’s later thought to bring about a transformation in our thinking. Heidegger’s philosophy is deeply original. He, like other powerful emptiness teachers, can revolutionize our understanding of what it means to “exist” or to “be.”
Watts, Alan (1999). Buddhism: The Religion of No Religion. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle
* Westerhoff, Jan (2010a). Twelve Examples of Illusions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. In this lovely book, Westerhoff, with the help of contemporary science, explores twelve examples of illusions from a Tibetan encyclopedia. These examples come originally from the Buddhist Perfection of Wisdom texts on emptiness. Reflection on these illusions can help you to get more insights into the empty, illusory nature of reality.
* Westerhoff, Jan (2012). Reality: A Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. In this short, very readable book, Westerhoff explores what it could mean for something to be “real.” As examples, he investigates dreams and simulations, matter, persons and time, and presents a variety of arguments that challenge naïve realistic views about these phenomena.
Wheeler, Samuel III (2000). Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida has a reputation for being very hard to read. This book does an admirable job of presenting his thought in a straightforward, step-by-step fashion. See especially the chapter “Indetermination of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson.”
Williams, Bernard (1976). Problems of the Self. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Well-known explorations of personal identity, including thought experiments that involve people swapping bodies.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2009). Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. First published in 1953. This ground-breaking work has original and innovative insights against Cartesianism, which is the widespread notion that the mind is an inner theater of experience cut off from the world and other people. Cartesianism is one of the most important targets of refutation for you as a meditator on emptiness. The book also refutes essentialist ideas about language which leads to a variety of powerful emptiness investigations. There are several editions and translations. You might find Marie McGinn’s book helpful as a companion.
* Wrathall, Mark (2006). How to Read Heidegger. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. This beautifully written introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy provides plenty of insights on how Heidegger’s revolutionary thinking is relevant to our own life experience.
Footnotes
1. For example Streng (1967) and Gudmunsen (1977) compare Nagarjuna to Wittgenstein. Magliola (1984) connects Nagarjuna and Derrida. Garfield (2002a) compares Nagarjuna’s work to that of Sextus Empiricus. See also Kuzminski (2010) for more comparative perspectives between Nagarjuna and Sextus.
2. Dharma is a Sanskrit word derived from the root “dhri,” which means “to uphold or maintain.” In Buddhist contexts, dharma refers to the teachings of the Buddha, or the path to enlightenment.
3. Indra’s Net is a metaphor for interdpendence and interpenetration. In the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra, Indra’s Net is likened to a net of jewels, each jewel reflecting the light reflected by all the others. Alan Watts brought this image to the attention of many people unfamiliar with Buddhists texts: “Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web covered with dewdrops. Every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops, and in each reflected dewdrop are the reflections of all the other dewdrops in that reflection, and so on, ad infinitum.”
Watts (1999) p.28.
4. “Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water. After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer mountains, and water was no longer water. But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains, and water is just water.” Master Qingyuan. See Garfield and Priest (2009).
5. This citation refers to Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, sometimes referred to as the Mulamadhyamakakarika or the Treatise on Emptiness. This is perhaps the single most important text per
taining to the emptiness teachings and represents Nagarjuna’s systemization of other Buddhist works on the topic, including the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutra (Conze 1995). For Nagarjuna’s text, we use Jay L. Garfield’s excellent translation and commentary (Nagarjuna 1995). But see also the translation by Mark Sidertis and Shoryu Katsura (Nagarjuna 2013).
6. This is a frequently cited line. Nagarjuna is said to have quoted this in his autocommentary to his Vigrahavyavartani. It also occurs in the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra (The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra in 8000 Lines), Chapter VIII:3. See Conze (1995), p. 145: “And the nature of all dharmas is no nature, and their no-nature is their nature.”
7. See Huntington (2007b) and Garfield (2008) for a summary of recent interpretations.
8. See Garfield and Priest (2002) and Garfield (2008).
9. Garfield and Priest (2002), pp. 96ff.
10. Huntington’s major views about Nagarjuna and logic are set forth in Huntington (2007b). See also Huntington (2007) and (2007a).
11. Huntington (2007b), p. 123.
12. Ibid., p. 126.
13. The challenge is generally acknowledged by the advocates of this approach. See Dreyfus (2003), especially the section entitled “Gen Nyi-Ma’s Approach to Madhyamaka.”
14. Our primary source material for this approach includes Cozort (1998), Dreyfus (2003), Gyatso (Dalai Lama) (1988), Gyatso (Dalai Lama) (2007), Hopkins (1995), Hopkins (1996), Hopkins (2008), Lati Rinbochay (1986), Napper (2003), Newland (2009) and Pabongka Rinpoche (2008).
15. See Garfield (1995) and Westerhoff (2010) for very helpful commentary on Nagarjuna’s interchanges with his discussion partners in the text.
16. For more details on this specific account of direct realization, see Hopkins (1996), p. 96ff, and Napper (1989), pp. 59, 91, 145.
17. Hopkins (1996) lays out 90% of the Mahayana path in terms of emptiness realizations on pp. 91-109. For the last 10%, tantra is said to be required. See pp. 111-123.
18. Hopkins (1996), p. 109.
19. See Hopkins (1996), pp. 67-90 for a presentation of the path to cultivate calm abiding.
20. See Huntington (2003) for a helpful presentation.
21. See, e.g., Hopkins (1995) pp. 199-200 and Hopkins (1996) pp. 255-261.
22. See “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” in Rorty (1989).
23. Adapted from Sokol (2009), p.42.
24. For more science-fictional thought experiments along these lines, see Parfit (1986) and Williams (1976).
25. Bruce Hood (2012) quotes Daniel Dennett on the narrative self. “Dan Dennett also thinks the self is constructed out of narratives: ‘Our tales are spun, but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us.’ There is no self at the core. Rather, it emerges as the ‘center of a narrative gravity’.” See also Dennett’s well-known paper “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” (Dennett 1992).
26. Libet et al. (1983).
27. Soon et al. (2008).
28. See www.simulation-argument.com. [Accessed June 20th 2013].
29. See Gergen and Gergen (2003) pp.27-32.
30. See Gergen (2009), pp. 109-111.
31. Siderits (2003) pp. 204-206 gives a beautifully worked out argument that the idea of a “best theory” doesn’t make sense either. There can be a better theory (properly contextualized) but no best theory.
32. Publishers Weekly, reviewed August 21, 2006. URL: www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-618-68000-9. [Accessed Nov. 24, 2012].
33. Siderits (2003).
34. An old farmer living in north China owned a beautiful horse that was praised far and wide. One day the horse ran away. The farmer’s neighbors offered sympathy over his terrible loss. The farmer simply replied, “Hmm, what makes you think so?”
A week later, the horse returned, followed by a beautiful wild stallion. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on his great good fortune. The farmer replied, “Hmm, what makes you think so?”
A month later, the farmer’s son was riding the stallion and fell off, breaking his leg. The neighbors expressed their condolences over his bad luck. “Hmm, what makes you think so?” said the farmer.
A few days later, a war broke out around the province. All the young, able bodied men were drafted and taken away to fight. The farmer’s son, with the broken leg was the only young man left behind. The neighbors came by to celebrate. What good luck, they thought! The farmer asked them, “Hmm, what makes you think so?”
35. See “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” in Rorty (1989). Although we take inspiration from Rorty’s liberal ironist, the joyful ironist is a bit different. The “liberal” in Rorty’s liberal ironist has a more explicitly political motivation. The joyful ironist, on the other hand, is very motivated by compassion, which may or may not be political. The most significant difference between our notion and Rorty’s is this. Rorty’s ironist feels “radical and continuing doubt” about their final vocabulary. This is an odd thing to say about the ironist, and perhaps even inconsistent with the rest of Rorty’s description. The joyful ironist, on the other hand, is happy with the emptiness teachings, and sees doubt as the kind of attitude that can arise only if they consider vocabularies as candidates for objective truth. But this is the very attitude about vocabularies that the joyful ironist has lost!
36. Siderits (2003), pp. 107ff.
37. World Health Organization’s Female genital mutilation fact sheet: www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/index.html [Accessed November 29, 2010]. See also the womenshealth.gov’s Female genital cutting fact sheet: www.womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/female-genital-cutting.cfm#d [Accessed November 29, 2010].
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